Not just what we own and possess, but what we house and platform

The museums are stuck in thinking of their collections as being their chief legitimating responsibility and in focusing on their collections as the central knowledge base of the museum. But what about all of the knowledge that is produced by the other ways museums perform and engage with a living art scene and a public: In the temporary exhibitions, performances, seminars, talks and events that make up a large part of most museums public programs? It would seem that a vast amount of knowledge is being produced in the context of museums, but not necessarily acknowledged or even remembered.

With a dissident archive at SMK and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde as a jumping off point, this curatorial practice based paper focuses on the other parts of museum performance than collecting and suggest a shift in perspective away from only focusing on what the museum can own and possess as its central claim to knowledge and towards recognising and prioritising the wider field of what the museums can – and already do – house and platform as an equally important part of its knowledge production.

This connects to questions of the kind of knowledge we are left with, what kind of art histories can we write, if we only have a historical record made up by the singular works that can be bought and kept in art collections as our knowledge base. How do we enable a historical record that paints a more accurate picture of the Danish arts scene?